A mother and her children are sitting on the doorstep of a Newcastle pub in the 1890s. They look like they’re waiting for the dad to come out, and hoping he had some money left from his session to feed them.
The pub was the Lord Nelson on Sandgate and stood next to Johnson’s Entry, which the woman on the left is emerging from. Sandgate had a dozen of these entries on its north side, they were narrow lanes about the width of the doorway and were lined with tenements that were extraordinarily squalid, even for the Victorian era.
Around 2,000 people lived in the entries, often two or three families in one room, making it the most densely populated place in the country. Newcastle Corporation was shamed into demolishing the south side of the street in the 1860s when a London newspaper said the stench in Sandgate was worse than Cairo and Calcutta. The North side wasn’t much better 30 years later, where we can assume the family in the photo were living.
The Lord Nelson was an ancient timber-framed building that would have originally been a dwelling house. It’s unclear when it became a pub, but its first appearance in the public record is in the 1822 edition of Pigott’s Street Directory. This would make it a veteran of the Sandgate Riots in the 1850s when violence erupted between the locals and the Irish community; several thousand men and women battled on the street and most of the pubs there were wrecked.
Sandgate remained the roughest part of town until the end of the century, which would explain why the landlord of the Lord Nelson has his windows partially boarded up in the photo. It was also the poorest part of town, and it’s unlikely the family on the doorstep would have been fed when their dad eventually spilled out of the pub.